Category: Society

The K-Shaped Economy: Raging Moderates on the Moral Collapse of American Prosperity

Galloway and Tarlov’s Raging Moderates episode captures America’s moral divide: a K-shaped economy feeding the top 1 percent while MAGA normalizes hate and authoritarian awe. Between Gatsby’s glitter and populist rage, they find the same creed—power without empathy, cruelty mistaken for strength.

This summary was generated with AI assistance to capture the moral and political through-lines of Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov’s latest Raging Moderates episode.

The full conversation is worth your time; watch it here.

Podcast: Raging Moderates – “Trump’s K-Shaped Economy”
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Jessica Tarlov

1️⃣ The K-Shaped Economy: America’s New Gatsby Era

During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, military families lined up at food pantries while Trump hosted a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago—girls in martini glasses, confetti over unpaid workers. That tableau, the hosts argue, is the moral diagram of the K-shaped economy itself.

“Budgets are moral documents.”

“America is a terrible place to be unfortunate.”

GDP may grow 3.8 percent, but for most Americans “the bottom 90 serve as nutrition for the top 10 percent.” Markets become morality plays; as Galloway notes, “As long as the stock market is up, you can do anything—even deploy secret police with masks.”

The metrics that matter are off-book:

  • Pawn-shop sales, auto-loan delinquencies, Hamburger Helper spikes.
  • Teen self-harm, anxiety, and hunger.

These, not the S&P 500, are the nation’s true balance sheet.
The “K” is a hieroglyph of our values—one arm ascending toward excess, the other collapsing into despair.

2️⃣ MAGA’s Dark Communion

Later the hosts turn from money to morality. Their focus shifts to Nick Fuentes, whose praise of Stalin exposes what the MAGA movement has become: a coalition comfortable with white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarian awe.

“Strength and masculinity have been conflated with coarseness and cruelty.”

“The most dangerous person in the world is a young man without economic or romantic opportunity.”

Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and their online echo chambers reveal a movement that glorifies domination and calls it leadership. Algorithms amplify the poison because rage pays. Ben Shapiro, once an architect of grievance media, now looks aghast at the antisemitic monster it unleashed—a moral recursion too late to contain.

3️⃣ The Moral Through-Line

Between Gatsby’s glitter and MAGA’s rage lies a single creed: power without empathy. One end worships wealth; the other worships strength. Both treat human beings as expendable.

“Budgets reflect the values of a nation.”

When compassion is weakness and cruelty is currency, prosperity becomes performative. The republic mistakes spectacle for virtue, the algorithm for conscience, and domination for destiny.

Stupid is as Stupid Does

Forrest Gump’s plain wisdom—“Stupid is as stupid does”—frames a meditation on ideology and discernment. We trade freedom for the comfort of belonging when we let ideas think for us. Faith is the way back to freedom: to think, to pray, to see.

Forrest Gump, an intellectually challenged man who was at the same time exceptionally wise, had a maxim: “Stupid is as stupid does.” In that single sentence lies an indictment of much of what passes for intelligence in our age — people with expansive vocabularies and expensive degrees still doing stupid things because they’ve given themselves over to emotional need without discernment and stopped thinking for themselves.

Ideology (Merriam-Webster): “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or culture,” and more pointedly, “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.”

Ideological (Merriam-Webster): “relating to or concerned with ideas or ideology,” and more critically, “characterized by blind or partisan devotion to a system or belief.”

The first is descriptive; the second is diagnostic. To believe an ideology is one thing: you have an ordered worldview. To have faith in it, however, is to let someone else do your thinking for you.

Most people don’t wake up and say to themselves, “Today, I’m going to let [insert ideology] do my thinking for me!” It doesn’t happen that way. It creeps in. We inherit our slogans from parents, pastors, pundits, or professors, and we wear them like armor against uncertainty. Over time, the armor becomes a cage — most clearly when it fuses with our identity. What once protected us begins to define us. Principles and faith demand the work of discernment — they force us to confront ambiguity and to wrestle with conscience. Ideology relieves us of that burden. It offers the comfort of belonging without the discomfort of examination. It trades freedom for (false) certainty and sells the exchange as virtue.

Ignatius of Loyola would have recognized this as a disordered attachment — the subtle clinging to anything that offers security at the cost of truth. When we identify more with our camp than with Christ, when we prize being right over being good, we begin to confuse the voice of the crowd with the voice of God.

Many ideologies begin as attempts to make sense of the world, and some even manage to remain supple — capable of reflection, repentance, and reform. But most do not. Once the slogans take hold, questioning becomes betrayal of oneself and one’s tribe. Curiosity feels like disloyalty. A set of ideas becomes the grounds for personal and corporate Pride, the mother of all sin. The all-important We then determines Truth and all the rest — replacing God.[1]

Faith, by contrast, is trust in God whom we can never fully know and who is always Mystery. It grows by encounter, by humility, by the willingness to be surprised. It doesn’t spare us the work of thinking; it deepens it. It doesn’t silence doubt; it sanctifies it by putting it in conversation with love. That’s what Ignatius meant by freedom — not the ability to do whatever we wish, but the grace to choose what leads us toward God even when the world shouts for certainty.

So, yes, “stupid is as stupid does.” Stupidity is the refusal — the refusal to look when Truth is right in front of you, whispering through the noise, inviting you — again — to be free: to think, to pray, to see.

  1. The Examen exists precisely to disrupt that drift: to pause, to look back, to notice what moved us toward love and what led us away. It’s not a prayer for the pure but for the brutally honest, for those who know how easily conviction turns into control. The Examen is a bulwark against idolatry. ↩︎

No Kings, No Knee: A Movement for Democracy

This weekend, I couldn’t join the protests but felt a renewed sense of civic spirit while observing from afar. The recent No Kings gatherings have transformed from mere protests into powerful rallies of unity and resolve. They reflected a deep commitment to democracy, reminding us that the instinct to resist lives on. Hope flourishes!

I didn’t march this weekend. Family duty came first, so I only drove past a small satellite protest, stopped quick to chat up some protestors, and kept it moving. But even from the margins, I felt something I haven’t felt in a while: the sense that ordinary people are remembering how to be citizens. For the last year I’ve had a gnawing feeling that Americans didn’t have the appetite to fight for democracy, that we’d rather rationalize power than restrain it. “No Kings” is the right slogan for that feeling: a polite, pointed reminder that we don’t bend the knee.

The first No Kings back in June gave me a pulse: hopeful, but fragile. The second one hit different. Same message, more backbone–a lot more. Less spectacle, more resolve. You could see it in the way people showed up everywhere and didn’t need a headliner to tell them what to do. It read less like a protest and more like a rally–a gathering of spirit.

I’ve been helped in naming this by The Bulwark crew, who’ve framed it not as left vs. right, but citizens vs. subjects. Their read tracked what I felt driving by: this wasn’t outrage cosplay. It was calm, patriotic, neighborly. Families with flags, marshals with de-escalation, a lot of honking. “There was nothing hateful about it,” someone said on the show, and that mattered.

Authoritarianism is, in part, a spell and these crowds broke it by refusing to play the villain in someone else’s story. MAGA provocateurs got a very powerful response: nothing. They were ignored. That discipline meant that this was not merely about just showing up. It was about movement, about soldiering.

What moved me most is how joy and seriousness coexisted. Joy says we remember who we are; seriousness says we know what’s at stake. The Bulwark folks called it out: June was people shouting “No!”; October was people saying “We still here…and we are moving.”

So, no, I didn’t lace up and chant this time. I waved, prayed a little, and kept my commitment to family. But I also exhaled. The first No Kings let me hope. The second let me believe that hope might scale. If democracy survives, moments like these will sit on the timeline—not because they fixed everything, but because they proved the instinct to resist still lives in us. And the slow work of God continues.

This Bears Repeating

We are locking up asylum seekers, intentionally traumatizing their children in order to traumatize their parents, and then calling it “security.”

Forgive the length but this bears repeating:

Trump overwhelmingly won the Catholic and evangelical votes. They were warned about this. Prophetically. The man in the White House is not a man of God nor even a Christian (at the very least you have to believe you need redemption to be one). They voted for him anyway. Some it appears lusted for power (and now feel some sense of it, read racists). Others were single issue voters on issues like abortion. I said this election and presidency would be one long civics lesson for these people and I was right. This is what you get when you vote for a sociopath. Kids forcibly removed from their parents, locked in cages by the dozens, hundreds.

A sociopath is “a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.” This certainly applies to Trump. He is not “the lesser of two evils.” Hillary was. But that’s like saying speeding is the lesser of two evils when compared to driving your car into a crowd of protestors. (And spare me the canard of abortion. It’s legal now and it’s going to stay quite legal for decades to come given the trends in women running for office. Trends instigated by you know who.)

Our nation has always done evil like this: slavery, Wounded Knee, the Tuskegee Experiment, and so on. No nation is God. Evil exists everywhere and in all of us. In particular, racism and greed are at root in this situation. And that makes our nation much like Sodom which BTW was not turned to ash for having gay pride parades:

Ezekiel 16:49 (NABre)
“Now look at the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters were proud, sated with food, complacent in prosperity. They did not give any help to the poor and needy.”

We are locking up asylum seekers, intentionally traumatizing their children in order to traumatize their parents, and then calling it “security.” Was such wonton callousness secure for Sodom?

For those who voted for Trump, you bear responsibility for this. For those who I know personally, understand that this is not a political issue. It’s a moral one (for me it always has been). Support for this tells me who you are. I will be watching.

Loving Your Neighbor is Communal

This conservative “Christian” idea that the Bible demands individual acts of charity and this government programs aimed at social and economic justice is flat out idolatry. Jesus himself spoke communally about justice and Judgment.

This conservative “Christian” idea that the Bible demands individual acts of charity and thus government programs aimed at social and economic justice can be resisted is flat out idolatry. Jesus himself spoke communally about justice and Judgment.

Mark 7:6-13 (NABre)

[Jesus] responded, “Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:

‘This people honors me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me;

In vain do they worship me,

teaching as doctrines human precepts.’

You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.” He went on to say, “How well you have set aside the commandment of God in order to uphold your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and ‘Whoever curses father or mother shall die.’ Yet you say, ‘If a person says to father or mother, “Any support you might have had from me is qorban”’ (meaning, dedicated to God), you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God in favor of your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many such things.”

And in one of the few places where Jesus condemns people to hell:

Matthew 25:31-33,41-46 (NABre)

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him. And he will separate them one from another, as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left…Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

In a country where government is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people are responsible for its morality. If your are Christian, as in an actual follower of Christ, then the government must act in certain ways for you to support it. If you want it to ban abortion, you better accept it should provide poor children with healthcare. Otherwise stop pretending to be a follower of Christ.

Me, too?

Sexual harassment and abuse have been front and center lately. I’ve been wondering how much of this is because men enjoy more power than women or something endemic to them?

Racism by the Numbers

Racism’s a big issue today but it’s all about the averages rather than just random experiences. I’ve had personal encounters with cops—some good, some bad—showing that these moments don’t tell the whole story. Focus on broader patterns and using data to fight misinformation, aiming for racial justice effectively.

The trouble with racism today is mostly in the averages. Specific instances add up over a population but are not evidence in and of themselves. Back in the day I took the Chinese view living day-to-day: expect the worst and hope for the best. Take the cops. I’ve had cops let me go when technically driving recklessly and I’ve had them follow for me for driving while black. I’ve had them give me a break on a speeding ticket because I was clearly distraught over a breakup and I’ve had them disrespect me and my wife in the street just to be a$$holes with power. These instance prove little unless you can see how they fit into the larger picture. 

Conservative racism deniers hate looking at the larger picture because a) it bucks their narrative and b) they refuse to take personal responsibility for the world they live in. (Ironic coming from the personal responsibility crowd.) They focus on instances saying they prove nothing. True. Halfway. Half truths are whole lies. That’s the game you have to play in when pushing for racial justice. Which is why I point to polls and studies. Evidence of the larger picture, reproduced PATTERNS, that put these instances in context. I’m a numbers guy by nature so this keeps me confident and grounded in reality.

So I get versed on the numbers. Understand the studies. Don’t get into shouting matches with falsely equivalent counterclaims. Answer myths with facts. Meet belief with morals. Crush stupidity with evidence based knowledge.

How hard do bishops have to listen?

Perhaps most interesting about the document, Hinze continued, is that it recognizes that some priests and bishops might not have figured out exactly what the church should be teaching on a particular subject.

“I thought it was pretty judicious that the hierarchy has to recognize that they may not have it right yet,” said Hinze, referring to a passage in the document that states that Catholics may “deny assent” to church teaching “if they do not recognize in that teaching the voice of Christ.”

via Vatican considers: How hard do bishops have to listen? | National Catholic Reporter.

Finally.

What happens when Jesus is not the answer?

Doing good cannot be an optional extra for Christians, but must be at the core of our existence.

What happens when Jesus is not the answer?:

Doing good cannot be an optional extra for Christians, but must be at the core of our existence. For our faith is not measured by a list of sound doctrine, but instead by the fruit it produces in doing good.

(Via Red Letter Christians)

Amen. Read the whole post. It’s worth it.

Quick Reply to Some Quick Thoughts

Opinionated Catholic: Quick Thoughts On Forced Organ Donation Hypo and Aborton.

Let me say at the outset that Opinionated Catholic’s thoughts are anything but quick.  You should take the time to read the full post. Good stuff in there. Opinionated Catholic has turned out be one of my good Twitter-friends whose thoughtful (stubborn 🙂 ) and carefully thought out (aggravating 🙂 ) ideas have been a blessing. Keeps me honest!

Opinionated Catholic (O.C.) has been careful to not speak for me on my position on abortion which I characterize as a Catch 22.  The short version is that a total and complete ban on abortion is ugly because it not only is akin to rape, but in extreme cases it is murder, so-called “double effect” exceptions notwithstanding. (That would take a whole other post!) On the other hand, abortion on demand is also ugly because it makes life a matter of convenience and by such logic I should not exist. My father was poor and born to a single mother. So there we have my basic position.  I should add that I am not trying to debate the morality of abortion per se or what should be the proper form of legal abortion.  I’m only interested in the morality and integrity of the Catholic position.

Now, in discussion with O.C., I asserted that the pro-life movement, at least that advocated by Catholics, is more pro-baby than pro-life since we will respect a person’s body in some cases where life can be saved by another person donating tissue but not others. I used organ donation as an example to show that we play favorites. We will go to any length in some cases, i.e. abortion, and not others.  I also asserted that this is not true to Christ who’s love knows no bounds since our love does in fact have bounds.

O.C. has made a compelling reply on the basis of voluntary and involuntary moral obligations.  For the sake of brevity, I will paraphrase I hope accurately.  The mother’s obligation to her child is different than merely person to person moral obligations.

  1. The mother has a duty to care for her child.
  2. The uterus unlike other organs exists for the express purpose of carrying her child and serves no other essential function.
  3. Denial of treatment, e.g. refusing kidney donation, is not the same as intentional act, e.g. abortion is killing the unborn child.

To all of this I would say, is a strong legal argument for limiting if not outright banning abortion if somehow the unborn can be given citizenship rights.  Until that happens, legal abortion will remain the law of the land.  A woman has no parental rights obligations whatsoever to a non-person under our law.  And the unborn are not persons under our law.  But what O.C. fails to see, as far as I can tell, is I am not arguing a legal case.  I’m looking at how Christ loves.  To wit, Christ was deeply radical in his love.  It is not a respecter of boundaries, especially as a disciple:

  • Matthew 10:37 “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;”
  • Matthew 5:43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. ’ 44 But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, 45 that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? 48 So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

This is not worldly love and makes worldly life difficult if one wants to be true to Christ. I am not saying that the abortion issue can’t be resolved. I for one would gladly ban it, under certain conditions. For example, if we had the technology to carry any child from zygote to full term by artificial means, I have no trouble at all banning abortion, taxing the responsible parties for child support (and the general public in cases e.g. rape), and making adoption a real social and governmental priority.

So if I love both mother and child, I have to be true to what it is I am doing. Justice is the sound love makes when it speaks in public. And my justice ultimately comes from Christ.  So if I play favorites with my love and say that the child is more valuable than the mother then I’ve sinned.  It’s why, if it came to it, I would put my body on the line to ban abortion. Justice demands that I be on the same chopping block as any rape victim.  If we can traumatize her to save her child, I can lose a kidney in fairness.